Word: francoed
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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There is nothing muddling about his new book, The Spanish Story. Here is the best-documented account so far of Franco's devious dealings with both the Axis and the Allies during the years 1939-44. Feis needed little filling in on the shifts and turns of the U.S. policy toward Franco; he was instrumental in shaping it. What gives his book its incisive and even exciting quality is his skillful use of captured enemy documents...
Modern Machlavelli. Franco emerges as Machiavelli's most finished 20th Century disciple. He got what he wanted-if not when he wanted it, at least in time to stave off internal disaster: U.S. oil and wheat when the U.S. and its allies needed both; German weapons and aviation gasoline when Hitler had barely enough for his own forces. How did he do it? As Feis carefully shows, by threats, by false promises, by outright lies, by playing the hopes & fears of the democracies against those of Hitler, and always by beautifully timed dissimulation...
...Franco offered to get into the war on the Axis side in the summer of 1940. But Hitler, riding high, had no military need of him and wouldn't hear of the Spaniard's price: Gibraltar and a huge African empire...
...Franco grew cagey in his dealings with Germany. At Hendaye, France, in the fall of 1940, he talked with Hitler for nine hours in the Führer's private car, "each entranced talker explaining himself in heedless stretches, recognizing no interruption or answer." Hitler thought he had sealed a pact; Feis shows that Franco had come to "seal a vacuum." A few days later Hitler told Mussolini that "rather than have the conversation over again, he would prefer to have three or four teeth pulled out." Franco soon decided that Spain should stay...
...Save Franco. When Hitler needed Spain's military help, Franco pleaded unreadiness. Hitler reminded the little Caudillo that without Hitler and Mussolini there would have been no Fascist Spain. Franco placated the Führer by refueling Nazi submarines with U.S. oil, giving German spies a free hand, and turning over the Spanish press to Axis propagandists. (Hitler had kept an itemized bill for his aid to Franco during the Spanish Civil War; Franco made payments on it all through World War II with U.S. food and oil and Spanish strategic materials which, he told the Allies, Hitler would...